Crooked Wreath

by Christianna Brand

  “How’s the army?” asked Edward, politely abandoning his own absorbing topic.

  “No place for a quiet country solicitor. My lot had a rough time in Normandy.”

  Peta ran down the broad steps to meet them. “Stephen! Darling, how heavenly! Stephen, so divine to see you!” Under her affectations and over-emphases her heart beat sickeningly and the enamelled fingertips clinging to his arm, shook with her nervous effort to control herself. “Dear Stephen, heavenly Stephen, I couldn’t be more thrilled to see anyone!”

  “You talk as though you weren’t expecting me, Peta,” said Stephen in his quiet way.

  Edward went on into the house. Philip came out and down the steps. “Hallo, Stephen. How are you? Haven’t seen you for ages.”

  They shook hands just a tiny bit awkwardly. Eight years ago, Philip had come home from America and presented himself at Swanswater for his grandfather’s blessing; and Sir Richard, overjoyed, had immediately summoned his lawyer to alter his will. “The only man in the family–after all, it’s simply sense that he should be my heir.”

  Stephen had argued. “You’ve always intended to leave everything to Peta, Sir Richard. It would have gone to your eldest son if he’d lived, and Peta’s his heir. I think you’ll regret it, if you change things now.”

  “What do you know about regretting or not regretting, a boy like you?”

  “It’s the advice my father would have given you,” said Stephen, doggedly.

  Sir Richard had wavered, new wills had been drafted, initialled, altered, and finally laid aside. “You’re quite right, Garde, the eldest would have had it and through him, Peta. And after all, what do I know of this lad? He’s my grandson, of course, but Peta’s been with us all her life, I’ve more or less brought the child up; she knows my ways, she understands what I feel about her grandmother’s memory, she’s the fitting one to live on at Swanswater.”

  And so Stephen had fought for Peta’s inheritance, and won, and in so doing, himself had lost. You do not secure an estate and a hearty fortune for a young woman, and then fall on your knees and ask her to marry you; not if you are a quiet country lawyer with nothing to offer in return but a steady old practice and no hope of anything more, no desire for anything more. So Peta was an heiress, and Stephen a misogynist, and it was never quite comfortable to shake Philip March by the hand. “How did you find Sir Richard?” asked Stephen, to cover it.

  “No better, no worse. It’s a condition; not a case that improves or deteriorates.”

  “Philip says his heart may dicker out at any time,” said Peta, “or he may go on for years.”

  “He’s in very good hands with your medical man down here,” said Philip, politely. “Brown’s prescribed coramine, and, of course, he’s right. I’ve brought a consignment down with me from town; if the old boy always has some by him in case of an attack, we can probably keep him going forever …” He broke off, bored by this profitless discussion with the laity. “Well, I believe Grandfather’s sent for some sherry.”

  Claire, coming downstairs, met them in the hall. “Stephen, my childhood friend, how are you?” She ran towards him holding out her pretty hands.

  “How lovely to see you, Claire,” said Stephen, kissing her lightly.

  Peta drooped in the background, wrapped in gloom. “Stephen, you kiss Claire, but you didn’t kiss me, when we met!”

  “My dear, you were leaping all round me like a young puppy dog; I didn’t have a chance.” Now that the chance was there, however, not to say offering itself, he did not seem very anxious to avail himself of it. “How are you, Claire? Still in the same old job?”

  “Yes, sweating away to Grandpapa’s great fury.”

  “Well, I don’t see why you stick to it when you know he hates it and so do you.”

  Claire became a trifle intense. “When one has writing in one, Stephen, one just has to get it out somehow; of course, journalism isn’t regarded as literature and actually I’m rotten at the newspaper stuff, reporting and all that, but still one can do one’s little piece trying to raise the standard of decent prose a bit. It’s all very mere, of course, but one can’t be content, one has to try.” She added, laughing, that anyway, Grandfather having cut her off with a shilling, she had to earn her living and it kept her out of the ATs.

  “What’s that about a shilling?” said Sir Richard, coming in from the river balcony.

  “Darling, I was saying that you having cut me off with one, I have to go on interviewing murdered bodies and asking Street Leaders how much they’ve collected for the Spitfire Fund and things. Look, Grandfather, here’s Stephen; oh, and, Stephen, here come Bella and Ellen.”

  “Time for a glass of sherry,” said Sir Richard with the naïve pride of one who, in 1944, still has Amontillado to offer. “I sent Edward to fetch the things; no use waiting for that palsied old crone we have now, and anyway it gives the boy something to do; keeps him from brooding over himself. He’s been off to town on his own now, Stephen, would you believe it? and came back filled with a pack of new nonsense, says if he looks up at anything he’ll drop whatever he’s carrying and go into a fugue or some such nonsense as that.” He pushed open the drawing-room door and stood aside for Bella and the girls to pass through.

  Over Serafita’s portrait the customary wreath of roses was hanging askew, and Edward stood staring up at it, a silver tray and a heap of broken glasses on the floor at his feet.

  3

  THEY STOOD grouped in the doorway, aghast and staring, and even as they watched, Edward moved forward, picked up the decanter of sherry which stood on the table, held it against the light, apparently to see that it was sufficiently full, and, replacing it, sat down in an armchair. As Sir Richard went forward uncertainly into the room, he said quite normally: “I got the sherry for you, Grandfather.”

  Bella burst into a pantomime of little signs and twitches–Don’t say anything, Keep it from him, Leave it all to me. Edward asked blinking: “What on earth’s the matter with you, Bella?” Like the rest of the family he called his grandmother by her Christian name.

  Peta knelt to pick up the broken glasses. “She’s telling us not to tell you that you’ve had one of your little passing-outs, darling.”

  Edward looked pleased. “Good Lord–have I?” His clenched fists relaxed on the arm of the chair. Bella, however, pushed past them all and ran to him. “My poor boy! How do you feel now, darling? Just keep quiet, don’t worry, let yourself go …” and immediately the hands curled again; he went very white and after a moment, sitting staring at her, he suddenly pitched forward fainting onto the parquet floor. Philip forced Bella aside and kneeling beside him, took the slack wrist. “Somebody–Ellen–get my bag for me, would you? It’s on the top of the wardrobe thing in our room.” He said to Bella: “Hush, be quiet!” and they were all silent while he counted the pulse beats. “Nothing wrong with him; just a faint.” When Ellen returned with the black leather medical bag, he selected a bottle, gave an injection and remained sitting on the floor, gently massaging the wrist with the ball of his thumb. Sir Richard turned away, staring grimly out of the window as though he could not bear to watch the unconscious boy, the rolled up eyes and loosely lolling mouth; it was impossible to tell whether he was distressed or merely disgusted. He broke the silence at last to say, abruptly: “Peta, Claire, go and get more glasses from the pantry. No need to make our guest uncomfortable.”

  Stephen was already sufficiently uncomfortable. Edward, however, soon came round and, having asked with some lack of originality where he was, was able to receive with composure the news that it was still the drawing-room at Swanswater. Finding himself the centre of so much attention, he further added that he now felt fine and would like some lunch. “And I think a glass of sherry would be grand.”

  “On the contrary,” said Philip, “it would be extremely silly.”

  Edward looked rebellious. “Let the boy have it,” whispered Bella, fearful of another attack. “It couldn’t do him any harm, and they
say it’s better not to thwart them.”

  “Rubbish,” said Philip, looking about for a jug of water. He filled the syringe from it and, going to the French window, squirted the water out in a thin curving arc across the terrace. “Oh, sorry, Brough–I nearly hit you–I didn’t see you were there!” The water finished up in a little pool at the farther side of the terrace and in a moment was dried up by the sunshine pouring down. Philip wiped the needle. “No, Edward, you definitely can’t have alcohol after an attack like that, so shut up! Bella must be out of her senses to want to allow it.”

  Bella’s pretty mouth folded into a stubborn line. “After all I do know about Edward, Philip! I’ve brought him up! I mean, you don’t really specialize in this sort of thing. You’re not an alienist. You know nothing about psychoanalysis, do you?”

  “No, indeed,” said Philip. “I’m not an Austrian Jew escaped after appalling hardships from a German concentration camp, so how could I? But even a general practitioner may have his poor little pathetic ideas about the suitability of alcohol after a fainting attack of this sort, and I say quite emphatically that I will not let Edward have it.” He flung open his bag and put away the syringe; slightly ashamed of his irritability, he added: “By the way, here’s the coramine I brought down for Grandfather.” Six thin glass phials each nested in its bed of cotton-wool in a tall cardboard box. “Everyone had better have a look. One ampoule during an attack–just inject it into the arm, any old where as long as you get it in. And don’t get funny, anyone, and go giving more than the one. Bella, Doctor Whatsaname’s shown you how to do it?”

  Bella was resentful and cross. “Yes, he has; he’s told me all about it and shown me how to do it, and the Broughs, too, in case your grandfather should be taken ill in the grounds. There’s no need, Philip, for you to interfere. And anyway,” said Bella virtuously, “I don’t think this is a conversation to be carried on in front of your grandfather!”

  “Nonsense,” said Sir Richard. “I’m the interested party! You’d better arrange some central place where the stuff can be kept, Bella, and see that everyone knows where it is.” But it maddened him to be subject to such weakness, to have to be fussed over like some silly woman. “A fine pair we are, Edward, with our faints and our heart attacks!”

  A crone so ancient and palsied as to be unacceptable even to the insatiable maw of the new Filling Factory at Heronsford (“Except possibly as a filling!” said Ellen), confided in a whining voice that dinner was on the table, Mum, and she’d be glad if they’d get on with it soon, as she and Mrs. Brough wanted to get ’ome–so, in the England of 1944, were Bella’s once elegant little luncheons announced. Edward insisted upon coming to the table with them, and the afternoon so inauspiciously began continued on what was to prove its disastrous course, till even Serafita, looking down from the canvas upon her peevish family, seemed to have changed her arch, painted smile for a little angry frown. Bella was on a high horse, pretending to herself that if Her Shame had not been known to all the family, Philip would not have been so abrupt and snubbing to her in the drawing-room just now.

  Philip and Ellen had spent a miserable and embarrassing twenty-four hours, for Swanswater hospitality did not extend itself to a “spare room” and he was sore and angry at Ellen’s needling mockery on the subject of their enforced intimacy. Ellen, blind with pain, nevertheless sought stupidly to disguise her humiliation under the cloak of raillery, and Claire, only half deceived but desperately self-deceiving, persuaded herself that Philip was hers by right of their love, that nothing else mattered because Ellen did not care. Edward was greatly excited by his faint in the drawing-room, and talked incessantly of the prognostications of Dr. Hartmann; Peta’s affectations were exaggerated almost beyond bearing by her efforts to appear natural and at ease. Stephen, sick with passion and longing, yet could not blind himself to the fact that his love was behaving like an ass. Sir Richard sat with lowering brow, his voice a deep rumble of thunder portending storm. “I don’t know why a man ever marries and has a family! Heaven knows he gets no pleasure from it. His children grow up and leave him, or get killed off in some war that does nobody any good and only leaves the world ready for the next war; his grandchildren are like creatures from another world. Look at Peta there–covering her pretty face with make-up, her nails half an inch long, and dipped in ox’s blood …”

  “Why ox’s?” said Peta.

  “… and Claire, her hands all spoilt and ugly from typing away like a hooligan in some scrubby Fleet Street office.”

  “A very grand office, I assure you, everything artificial right down to the light and air.”

  “And Philip–five years married and one puny child to show for it!”

  “You talk as though I were a pedigreed stallion,” said Philip.

  “All unhappy families resemble each other, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” said Bella. She added: “‘War and Peace.’”

  “‘Anna Karenina,’” corrected Philip immediately.

  “To be a woman and to be an intellectual, my dear children–thiss iss not compatible,” quoted Peta to the table at large, in a mockery of Serafita’s broken English.

  “Don’t you ever marry, Stephen, my boy,” said Sir Richard, sweeping all interruptions aside, helping himself angrily to grilled sausages. “You take my advice if you want a happy life. Don’t marry. And don’t have a family.”

  Ellen was riled by his earlier reflection upon the physique of her solitary offspring. “In Sir Richard’s experience, the two are not necessarily synonymous!”

  It was in tune with the customary banter of the family upon this subject; but Ellen was not one of the family, and the words were spoken without laughter or love. Bella was furious. “How dare you, Ellen, speak so disrespectfully to Philip’s grandfather?”

  “Well, how dare he speak so disrespectfully about my child? She’s not puny in the least. She’s actually overweight for twenty months.”

  “I don’t care a tuppenny damn about the weight of your child,” cried Sir Richard, assailing his sausages as though they had done him an injury. “What do I know about nursery weights and measures? I simply say that one child is not enough. Men are being killed off every day in this monstrous, useless war, the birth rate’s going down and down …”

  “Actually the birth rate’s soaring, Grandfather, since the war,” said Philip.

  “Up the illegits!” said Peta.

  Sir Richard was scandalized. “Peta, I will not have doubtful jokes of that nature at my luncheon table.”

  “Well, I’m a doubtful joke of that nature, Grandfather,” said Edward gaily, “and I’m at your luncheon table.”

  They all fell into hopeless giggles, lost in admiration of Edward’s wit and daring, goading each other on to fresh feats of naughtiness. Sir Richard’s brow grew increasingly black.

  “I apologize for my family, Stephen. I realize more and more that none of the modern generation have any manners, reticence, or good feeling, and apparently my grandchildren are no exception to the rule.”

  “A fine example of manners, reticence, and good feeling you set us,” said Philip. “Discussing my fertility at the top of your voice in this earthy way. What’s it to you how many children I have?”

  “And, besides,” said Edward, made bold by his earlier success, “it’s no use talking because he can’t have any more. He and Claire have fallen in love and now Philip sleeps in the spare room. Don’t you, Philip?” In the ensuing silence he clapped his hand to his mouth and regarded his cousin with increasingly genuine dismay. “Oh, Lord! Have I gone too far?”

  The clouds broke. The rains came. Faithless, feckless, unstable, unprincipled, irresponsible … Sir Richard rolled out accusation and condemnation and, a little late, demanded explanation. “Philip–is this true?”

  “If you insist upon discussing my marital relations at the luncheon table,” said Philip angrily, “yes. It is.”

  “You’re in love with your cousin Claire?”


  Claire sat proud but trembling, her corn-coloured head held high.

  “Yes, Grandfather. We’re in love,” she said.

  Sir Richard pounded the table. “Hold your tongue, miss; I wasn’t speaking to you. Now, Philip.”

  “What’s it got to do with you, anyway?” said Philip.

  “What’s it got to do with me? What’s it got to do with me? I’ll soon show you what it’s got to do with me! You’re my family, aren’t you? Claire’s my family, isn’t she? Haven’t I brought her up in my own house, given her her education, given her everything she’s ever had? Didn’t I help you through your studies when you came over here, didn’t I help with the purchase of your practice, didn’t I help you and Ellen when you first set up house? What’s it got to do with me? Am I to sit back and see my family disgraced, am I to acknowledge to the world that my only grandson couldn’t stick five years by one woman, without going off with his own cousin? Spare bedroom, indeed! One solitary child, because, forsooth, you fall in love with this inky-fingered chit, and sleep in the spare bedroom!”

  “What do you expect me to do?” said Philip. “Set Claire up in a bijou house at Yarmouth?”

  Bella dissolved into tears, Claire sat with working face, Ellen rocked on the back legs of her chair and said airily that if she didn’t mind, she didn’t see why Sir Richard should. “Well, you damn well ought to mind,” said Sir Richard, transferring his wrath to her. “The whole thing’s your fault, Ellen, for letting Philip get tangled up in this ridiculous affair. If you’d had a couple more children, if you’d given Philip a more comfortable home …”

  “To have three children, and to give your husband a comfortable home, thiss iss not compatible,” said Peta.

  “Mind your own business, Peta. A child like you interfering in the affairs of your elders! You ought not even to know what we’re talking about!”

  “Here we go round the gooseberry bush!” sang Peta, impudent eyes alert for admiration of her naughtiness.

  They relapsed into hysterical laughter. “I’ll disinherit the lot of you!” shouted Sir Richard, standing up suddenly in his place, thumping his fist down upon the table so that the china and glasses leapt on the old red mahogany. “I’ll cut you all out of my will, the whole ungrateful pack of you! Ill-mannered, irreverent, immoral … I’ll throw you out on the world without a penny, I’ll change my will this day, this very day, you see if I don’t … The whole thing can go to Bella and after her to Edward; the poor boy may be feeble-minded, but at least he can’t go plunging the family into scandal and disgrace.”